👋 Edito 👋

🩺🙅 In terms of crisis PR, you can't do much better than Doctolib.

When France's L’Autorité de la concurrence (Competition Authority) announced on November 6 that it was slapping a €4.6M fine on the healthtech unicorn for abusing its dominant market position, the company issued a statement claiming:

"The decision is surprisingly based on Doctolib’s acquisition of a small start-up (My Doctor) in 2018."

This triggered outrage across the French tech ecosystem.

“It’s simply a scandal...Consolidation is our only way to accelerate the growth of European start-up tech companies against the US and Asian giants with almost unlimited capital," wrote France Digitale CEO Maya Noël on LinkedIn.

Maddyness wrote: "It is therefore not only a company that is questioned, but a logic of growth."

Doctolib had artfully managed to make the MonDocteur deal the centerpiece of the debate.

However, the ruling was NOT primarily penalizing Doctolib for acquiring its competitor MonDocteur, although that was an incidental part of it. Rather, what the authority found was that Doctolib abused its market position by insisting on exclusivity for all health care providers and using a predatory pricing scheme. The complaint was originally brought in 2021 by Cegedim Santé, a traditional player in the French healthcare software market.

Whether this is true or a fair interpretation of its actions is another question. Doctolib has said it plans to appeal the ruling. In its statement, the company downplays discussions of these pricing practices. But the authority offers a fair bit of detail in its announcement of the fine based on Doctolib's internal documents:

1. Doctolib imposed in its subscription contracts with health professionals an exclusivity clause that prohibited them from using rival medical appointment-making services or teleconsultation solutions. Internal documents indicated that Doctolib's legal team alerted executives to the fact that such an exclusivity clause “is illegal under competition law.” Still, Doctolib's president acknowledged this legal opinion in another internal document but wrote: “that it must be strategically kept.” The Authority also notes that many of Doctolib’s internal documents corroborate this desire to impose exclusivity on health professionals, with its leaders displaying the desire “[to] be a mandatory and strategic interface between the doctor and his patient in order to lock them both in.”
2. With the launch of Doctolib Teleconsultation in 2019, the company required any medical provider to also subscribe to its Doctolib Patient to access this solution. The health professional had to pay for both services cumulatively and stop any other services.
3. When Doctolib acquired MonDocteur in July 2018, it was so small that it fell below certain thresholds for more intensive reviews. But in the context of the new complaint, authorities went back and reviewed the deal again. The investigation found internal documents that indicated the motivation for the deal was to "kill the product" and that the value of the deal "is not the addition of the asset but its disappearance as a competitor.” Another internal document indicated that by acquiring MonDocteur, “Doctolib will operate without any competition in France anymore.” In addition, Doctolib saw this acquisition as an opportunity to subsequently "increase [its] prices by 10% to 20%." It did indeed implement several successive price increases, even larger than initially planned, without impacting its growth rate or losing customers, according to the Authority.

Regarding the MonDocteur deal, the Authority acknowledges it is in a legal grey area. Its decision is based on a 2023 European Union Court of Justice ruling ("Towercast") that forbids "predatory acquisitions." That ruling technically clarified a 1973 ruling. So even though the Authority felt certain about the predatory actions, it also opted to levy a minimal fine regarding the deal.

Bottom line:

• Doctolib is being fined €4.615M for the exclusivity sales practices.
• It is being fined €50,000 for the MonDocteur deal.

Chris

Inside this week's edition:

👀 Macron warns that space is no longer a sanctuary, announcing major new space defense investments and says he wants 'New Space' and DefenseTech French startups to help counter rising orbital threats from Russia and other hostile powers.

👀 In a world where women still raise just 2% of VC funding, Sylvie N’hansana defies every statistic: engineer, black belt, and CEO of Qare and HealthHero France. She's now building what could become the world’s first truly global teleconsultation platform. We sat down with her to learn about her journey.

Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

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Tech Talk

☔️🦄 WebSummit just wrapped up its 10th edition. Lisbon, known for its great weather, promises 3o0 days of sunshine. But this year's key global tech meet edition served up 72 hours of torrential rain instead.

According to the organizers, more than 70,000 attendees from 160+ countries squeezed into Portugal’s rainy capital, while VIP attendees' private jets (green tech anyone?!) got politely rerouted to Spain. Tech titans, start-ups, influencers, and ...sports stars... rubbed shoulders. There were 2,500 start-ups, 900 speakers, and AI conversations hotter than the puddles on Avenida da Liberdade. Vibe coding, AI ethics, regulation, and Europe’s energy-hungry data centers dominated the agenda. Poland flexed the most start-ups, Germany shrugged, and China reminded everyone it’s definitely still in the AI race.

Among the French stars on stage were: Théau Peronnin of Alice & Bob (Fault-tolerant quantum computing), Antoine Fabre of Tomorro (AI-driven contracts), and Jean Baptista of Deeplife (building digital twins of cells for drug discovery).

Our intrepid Helen O'Reilly-Durand braved the elements and throngs of humanity to interview Arago CEO Nicolas Muller on stage about building a new computing paradigm to power the future of AI with photonic chips. (See our Deep Dive on the company here.) By replacing transistors in the chips with lasers, Arago can compute more info with less, which is more energy efficient and faster. Manufacturing is already underway.

🦾 💸 Making the most of the WebSummit buzz, Pitchbook dropped their latest investor survey findings. It would seem that investors are officially letting AI touch their deal flow. PitchBook’s survey shows 40% of European deal value now wears an AI badge. Healthcare is the belle of the ball, set to gobble 44% of AI investment in five years. Cybersecurity and Enterprise Apps trail behind with 29% and 32% whereas Fintech is…politely ignored. Investors adore AI for summarizing due diligence (34%) and sniffing out deals (26%), yet 25% fret about data accuracy and 26% fear over-reliance, showing robots aren’t totally trusted yet. Fun fact: 41% believe AI could replace market research completely, but humans will still gatekeep judgment. In short: algorithms are hot, humans are still VIPs, and your exec team better be sharp. | Pitchbook

💻 💸 Fleet Says No. Thanks. French IT leasing startup Fleet just turned down several minority LBO offers that could have handed its founders around €30M in cash. Apparently, they’d rather keep the wheel. The bootstrapped company, founded in 2019, now boasts €35M in ARR and 100% year-on-year growth, all with a lean team of 40. Not bad for a startup that’s never raised a cent. Sometimes, ownership really is the ultimate flex. | Les Echos

🪑📉 Selency’s Softer Landing. Not all vintage ages well. Selency, the French second-hand furniture platform, saw revenues fall 36% to €5.9M in 2024–2025. But at least it halved its losses to €1.4M. Backed by Creadev, Accel, and the Mulliez family, the startup has swapped Maxime leadership too: Maxime Maffani (ex-Colizey) takes over from Maxime Brousse. A fresh coat of leadership, maybe, but the market’s still looking a little worn.😜 | Les Echos

🇪🇺 💬 A Very Exclusive Sovereignty Summit. Co-hosted by France and Germany in Berlin next Tuesday (18 November), the event will cap attendance at just 900 guests, just 300 per host country and 300 for “the rest of Europe.” Expect all the usual suspects, including Mistral AI, to orbit the discussion. No word yet on whether Emmanuel Macron will make an appearance; the president might instead swing by Adopt AI in Paris a week later, where 25,000 visitors and half the CAC 40 (Orange, Airbus, Carrefour…) are set to pack the Grand Palais. November is shaping up to be peak AI diplomacy season. | Les Echos

🌱💼 From French Tech to Green Tech. A bit of musical government chairs: Shaheen Javid, formerly deputy chief of staff to Clara Chappaz at La Mission French Tech, has joined Mathieu Lefèvre’s team at the Ministry for Ecological Transition. Her brief is to bring more of an entreprise mindset into the ministry. In other words, a little startup speed in a land of slow-moving sustainability. | Les Echos

'Space Is Now a Battlefield': Macron Unveils €4.3B Defense Plan And Appeals To Startups

In a sobering address at France's new military space command center in Toulouse this week, President Emmanuel Macron warned that the era of peaceful space exploration has ended and that hostile nations have transformed Earth's orbit into a new theater of war requiring unprecedented defensive measures.

"Space is no longer a sanctuary; it has become a battlefield," Macron told military officials at the Space Command facility in Toulouse, detailing a litany of aggressive acts by what he termed "powers of aggression" that have brought terrestrial conflicts into the cosmos.

To counter these threats, France is expanding its military space capabilities with an additional €4.2 billion investment through 2030, bringing total military space spending to over €10 billion. The funding will accelerate development of what Macron described as "active defense" systems designed to protect French satellites and, if necessary, neutralize threats in orbit.

During his speech, Macron talked of lasers and patrol satellites and the growing menace of Russia from above. But for France's space entrepreneurs, he delivered a succinct message:

We want you.

"The domestic market for startups must natively be the European market," Macron declared, signaling a fundamental shift in how France views its space entrepreneurs.

In other words, he is signalling the government would stop viewing them as scrappy outsiders, but essential partners in a new space race where commercial innovation and military capability are increasingly intertwined.

Will that happen?

From Laos to Leading Europe’s Biggest Teleconsultation Platform:
The Unstoppable Rise of Sylvie N’hansana

Before she ever led one of Europe’s most ambitious digital health platforms, Sylvie N'hansana learned to move through the world with precision, first as an engineer, then as a finance specialist, then as the operator behind several of France’s most prolific scale-ups.

When she took the stage at France Digitale Day this year, she spoke with the quiet confidence of someone who has watched more than one industry transform from the inside out. That is indeed the case for the engineer-turned-CEO of Qare and HealthHero France, who is quietly building what could become the world’s first truly global teleconsultation platform.

In an industry where women still receive just 2% of venture capital funding, female tech leaders are rare. Female tech leaders who run Europe’s leading teleconsultation platform and happen to have a black belt in karate are rarer still.

Curious to learn more about her unusual path from Laos to London via Paris with roles at Meetic and TripAdvisor, I caught up with her to talk about ambition, technology, and the glass ceilings she’s been busy breaking.

“I always wanted an exceptional career,” she said. “I’m from Laos, and I wanted to build something for the country. I wanted to build a train. There are no trains in Laos.”

💸 Top Funding Deals 💸

📇 Company: U-Space
🔍 Description: Toulouse-based manufacturer of modular satellites, providing end-to-end capabilities from design to assembly to in-orbit operations. U-Space serves the rapidly scaling global small-satellite constellation market with proprietary software, 12U and FreeForm platforms, and a fully digitized industrial line inspired by automotive manufacturing.
💻 Website: U-Space
📍 HQ City: Toulouse, France
🧗 Round: Series A
💰 Amount Raised: €24 million
🏦 Investors: Blast’s Definvest fund (Bpifrance & French Ministry of Armed Forces, co-lead), Expansion Venture Capital, Primo Capital, Karot Capital, ARIS Venture Capital, Vertech Finance, CapSpace, Audacia (co-invest)
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Fabien Apper, Antoine Ressoucche
🗞️ News: U-Space raised €24M to accelerate its industrial scale-up and global expansion after previously securing €7M in 2022. The company targets producing one satellite per week by 2027, with an eventual goal of one per day thanks to its new 850 m² U-Zine cleanroom facility. U-Space already has three satellites in orbit (NESS, Soap, Pandore) and a dozen in production, and is expanding into APAC and MENA markets. Avolta acted as exclusive advisor on the transaction. | Space News, EU Startups, Maddyness, FrenchWeb

📇 Company: sunday
🔍 Description: sunday is a restaurant-focused payments platform created by the founders of Big Mamma to transform the dining experience. Initially launched as a fast and seamless QR-code payment solution, it now connects every customer interaction — ordering, payment, loyalty, and CRM — through deep integrations with more than 50 POS and restaurant systems. Used by over 80 million diners, sunday helps restaurants increase tips, improve feedback collection, boost average basket size, and streamline operations.
💻 Website: Sunday
📍 HQ City: Paris, France
🧗 Round: Series B
💰 Amount Raised: $21M (≈ €18M)
🏦 Investors: DST Global Partners
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Victor Lugger, Tigrane Seydoux, Christine de Wendel
🗞️ News: sunday raised a $21M Series B to accelerate global expansion and scale its all-in-one restaurant operating system. The company has tripled in size over the past year and now processes $4B+ in annual payments across 3,000 restaurants in the U.S., France, and the U.K. The new funding fuels 2026 ambitions: covering all restaurant formats from fast-food kiosks to Michelin-starred dining, expanding across major U.S. cities and Dubai, and doubling revenue, customer volume, and product adoption by summer 2026. | FrenchWeb, Maddyness, Sifted

📇 Company: Filiz
🔍 Description: Filiz is a French EdTech SaaS platform that helps private schools and apprenticeship centres manage their financial, administrative, and academic operations. Already used by 500+ campuses, the platform streamlines funding flows, attendance-linked public payments, invoicing, compliance, and academic planning. Filiz is now expanding into an integrated all-in-one operations system with upcoming AI-powered tools for task automation, planning, and real-time insights.
💻 Website: Filiz
📍 HQ City: Olonne-sur-Mer, France
🧗 Round: Seed / Early Growth
💰 Amount Raised: €6 million
🏦 Investors: Hexa
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Maxime Jacquet, Aurélia Jacquet
🗞️ News: Filiz raised €6M from Hexa to scale its education-operations platform across Europe, marking one of the largest administrative EdTech rounds in 2025. The startup has tripled revenue year-on-year to reach €2M ARR while remaining profitable. The partnership with Hexa includes both capital and multi-year operational support, aimed at expanding Filiz’s reach, strengthening its leadership team, and evolving the product to support larger multi-campus networks. The round stands out in a year where comparable European EdTech raises — such as DigitalErleben (€1M) and Kidola (€1.3M) — remained in the lower single-digit range. Filiz aims to grow revenue 10× within five years as private education surges across Europe. | EU Startups

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